Deadly Little Sins (22 page)

The corners of her mouth are turned down. She heard the phone call. “Don’t go by yourself.”

“I can take a cab.” My voice is trembling. “Let me find Kels first—”

“Anne, I’m fine.” Remy touches her nose, as if taking a sobriety test. “Go, okay?”

So I do. I don’t stop on the way out, even though I know Brent is watching me from his spot at the beer pong table.

I’ve worked myself up to believing that Anthony’s gone already, so I almost gasp when I see the dark figure leaning against the overpass guardrail.

“Right here is fine,” I tell the cab driver. He gives me a funny look, but doesn’t question it. Probably because campus is less than half a mile away. It’s visible from here: a brick and ivory village set atop a hill, bathed in a soft yellow glow.

I climb over the guardrail to get to Anthony, my stomach dipping when I see what he sees: a fifty-foot drop into the rocks below. Just beyond the rocks is the lake that flows all the way to the quarry.

When he looks over at me, I’m struck by how different his face looks from my memory of it. His eyes are less of a brilliant gray—now they just remind me of the color of the clouds before a storm.

I’m trembling. “You scared the shit out of me.”

“I couldn’t sleep,” he says.

I’m suddenly aware of how little I’m wearing, and the ridiculous makeup on my face. I motion to rub some of the fake blood away from my lips. Anthony stops me. Touches my chin, tilts me so I’m facing him full on.

He laughs. It’s brief and quiet, but it still looks wrong on him. His eyelids are shiny and heavy, and he hasn’t shaved in at least a few days.

“Thanks,” he says. “For coming. You didn’t have to.”

“Are you kidding?” Anger creeps into my voice. And I realize that yes, I am angry. “You’re on a
bridge
in the middle of the night.”

“I wasn’t gonna do anything.” He takes his hand back. Buries his face in his palms. “I just needed to get out of there. Away from everything. I just want it all to stop.”

“You’re not exactly pleading a convincing case,” I say.

“Look, I know I messed up.” He looks up at me. “After what happened, I thought everything would just go back to normal. But you were
gone
, and I just got to thinking that I’d be better off without you at all.”

I bite the inside of my cheek. “Thanks for letting me know.”

“I don’t expect you to get it.” He paces, angrily, to the edge of the overlook and back to the guardrail. “I saw Shepherd, holding a gun, and I ran
toward
him. For you.”

“You didn’t have to,” I say. “You hate me for almost getting me killed, but you didn’t have to do anything we did.”

Anthony blinks. “You think that’s why I’ve been avoiding you? That I blame you for what happened?”

“You can barely even look at me,” I choke out.

“Hey.” Anthony takes my hand. His is ice cold. “We both decided to go to the house, and neither of us would have gone if we’d known he was there. I don’t blame you.”

It’s not what I expected him to say, but there’s still a weight pressing down on me. Maybe the problem is that I can’t stop blaming myself.

“I was ready to die for you, and afterwards I realized I don’t even know your middle name. Or your favorite color.” Anthony’s upper lip quivers. “I thought it was because of somethin’ crazy, like maybe I was in love with you—but I’ve been replaying that moment, and even though I was trying to protect you, I think it just felt like my life meant nothing to me.”

Neither of us says anything, the occasional car speeding beneath us punctuating the silence. Anthony is the one to speak finally.

“When I said I’m not in love with you—I meant that I’m pretty damn close.” He looks over at me. I avert my gaze to my feet, which are throbbing in my heels. If it weren’t so rocky up here, I’d take them off.

“Anne. Say something.”

“I don’t know what
to
say.”

I changed this summer, along with my feelings for Anthony. I know now that when you love someone, you can’t pick and choose which of his demons you can live with. You can’t pretend there’s still that shiny layer on the surface once it’s stripped away and all you can see is the person underneath. The real one.

Anthony chose to follow me into the dark that night because he was already living in it.

And now that it’s my turn to decide, I can’t follow him.

“I’m calling Dennis,” I say. “You’re drunk.”

Dennis doesn’t question it when I call him from Anthony’s phone, saying he needs a ride home. Anthony doesn’t fight me. Much.

“I’m fine to drive. My bike is at the Seven-Eleven.”

“Did you leave it there before or after you had a couple beers?”

“After. I walked here.”

“Still stupid.”

Headlights approach us on the overpass. A gray Honda Accord pulls up. Dennis gets out of the car, wearing a flannel shirt and jeans. I feel awful that I called him on his night off. I wonder what he even does on his nights off.

“It’s all good, jefe.” Anthony’s voice has sobered up. He walks an imaginary line, like,
See?

Dennis is the type of guy that keeps most of his thoughts to himself, but judging by his face, I can tell exactly what they are right now. He shakes his head at Anthony. “Get in the car.”

I try to ignore the fact that I just called a
cop
to pick up a drunken teenager. “Thanks, Dennis.”

He nods to me. “Let me take you back to school.”

I wanted to walk, to air out the smell of beer on me, but I’m too tired and cold to argue. “Thanks.”

I get into the front seat next to Dennis. Anthony is already in the back, staring out the window. Dennis drops him off at the police station.

“Sleep it off on the couch,” he commands. “I’ll bring you home later.”

Anthony doesn’t argue. Instead, he quietly thanks Dennis and gets out of the car. He stumbles to my side and taps on the window. I sigh and open it a crack. Dennis turns his head the other way.

“I want to do better than this,” Anthony says.

“I can’t show you how,” I say. “I’m trying to figure the same thing out myself.”

Anthony reaches for my hand. Kisses the knuckles. “Just stay safe, ’kay?”

I nod. I wonder if I’m doing the right thing, and whether I should have said something more.

But talk is cheap. And I’m tired of should-haves.

Dennis and I spend the ride back to school in silence. For the most part.

“In high school, there was this girl…”

“Dennis, come on.” I roll my eyes.

“Anyway. I was a lot like Anthony as a kid. Thought I was the angriest guy in the world, that no one would ever understand the shit I was going through.” Dennis shrugs. “This girl, I really liked her, but one day, she just got tired of trying to fix me.”

I’m quiet. Dennis looks over at me.

“I didn’t even go through half the stuff Anthony’s been through,” he says. “Someday he’ll figure out how to deal. But you’re a smart chick for not sticking around and waiting.”

His scanner crackles when we get to the curb.

“FD still has Founder’s Path closed off.”

Dennis frowns and mutes the scanner. I don’t miss the sideways glance he gives me first. I nod at the scanner.

“What was that about?”

“Car fire earlier this afternoon,” he says. He’s holding something back.

I gnaw the inside of my cheek.
Founder’s Path
.

The Wheatley annex is on Founder’s Path.

“What’s really going on?” I ask.

“You’re going to find out anyway.” He sighs. “We found an abandoned vehicle this afternoon. Torched. The car is registered to someone named Lucas Barnes. He reported the car stolen over a week ago.”

My old headmistress said you should never ask a question you don’t want to hear the answer to. I swallow. “What was inside?”

Dennis rubs the area below his eyebrow. Wipes his hand down his face. “A body.”

CHAPTER

THIRTY-ONE

“Whose body?” I demand.

“There wasn’t much left,” Dennis says. “It’ll take us weeks to find out.”

We’re idled at the curb. I can see the security guard in the booth, reading a newspaper.

My throat is tight, like someone’s tried to choke me. “Do you think it’s her?”

“I don’t know.” He pauses. “But it does appear to be female, yes.”

“Oh, my God.” I lean back and press my fingers to my eyes. I’m tired of keeping my cool in front of people. She’s really dead, and the worst part is I’ve known it all along and refused to let myself accept it. I cry, like a little kid, whimpering
Oh my God
over and over.

“Anne. Anne. Hey.” Dennis pries a hand away from my eyes. “It could be anyone in there.”

“Do you really believe that?”

There’s a loaded silence. “I know you really cared about this woman, but she lied to you. She lied to a lot of people, from the looks of it. If it’s her, we’ll find out who did this.”

I wipe the tears from my lash line. My fingertips come away black. I don’t have it in me to point out that the detectives told me the same thing after Isabella was murdered. I’m not going to call Dennis out on empty promises when he’s been so nice to me tonight.

“Luke Barnes is in Texas until tomorrow,” I say. “He couldn’t have done it.”

Dennis gapes at me. “And you know that because…”

“I … talked to him. I’m sorry.”

No cops or I kill her.
What does it matter, if she’s already dead?

“It’s okay.” Dennis sighs. “You’ve gotta promise me you won’t do anything drastic until we find out more, okay?”

Now I nod. “Promise.”

At least I’m not the only one making promises I can’t keep.

I have two missed calls from Remy when I get back to the dorm. I wash the tear-smeared makeup off my face in the bathroom and collapse into bed, ready to text her back, when my door swings open. Remy’s headpiece is askew and her curls are falling flat.

“Oh, thank God. I was so worried about you,” she says.

“I’m okay. You’re back early.” It’s only a little past midnight.

“April puked right after you left. We had to take a cab to the Quick Mart and get her coffee.” Remy flops onto her bed. “Ugh, I have the spins. Night, lady.”

“Night.”

She turns the light out, and she’s snoring lightly within minutes.

I grab my laptop and sit up in bed. I can’t go to sleep. Not when there’s a charred body in the morgue that may be Natalie. I log into the campus security feed with the passcode Farrah gave me.

Like they say, if you’re looking for Gretel, find the first breadcrumb. Or something like that.

I can’t forget the last date that Ms. C was on campus—May 15—because it’s the same day I was unofficially expelled. I enter the date into the search box and get an alert.

The date you have entered is more than six weeks old. Retrieving the footage could take an hour or more. Continue?

Fantastic. Well, I doubt I was going to fall asleep tonight anyway.

Finally, there’s movement on my computer screen. The frame has defaulted to the camera by the security gate at midnight the day that Ms. C disappeared.

An eerie feeling settles over me. In this moment, I’m asleep, with no idea what the day ahead is going to bring. Travis Shepherd is still alive.

I toggle the screen so it’s displaying the cameras outside the administration building, the humanities building, and the parking garage. I figure Ms. C had to have taken one of these paths at some point in the morning. It’ll take a while, but I can use the pieces of footage to reconstruct her day.

I fast forward through frame after frame of the empty campus. There probably won’t be any movement on-screen until around five, when the athletes start their morning runs.

I pause around three thirty, my heart hammering in my chest. There’s a dark figure heading for the parking garage. She keeps her head down and avoids the floodlight at the entrance, but the light reaches far enough to illuminate her red hair.

It’s her.

She’s carrying a briefcase: That’s the detail I absorb about her before she disappears into the garage. What the hell is she doing in there at the ass-crack of dawn?

I wait for her to come out, but there’s no movement on the screen. I fast forward—nothing. By the time the sun rises past the garage and teachers start driving through the gate, Ms. C still hasn’t emerged.

I switch my view to the full screen of the humanities building, where Ms. C’s office is. Teachers trickle in, balancing their coffees with stacks of papers. At 7:22, Ms. C leaves the building. I blink a couple times—she never
entered
the building.

At least according to the camera. But I know better. Cameras lie. Especially at Wheatley.

I freeze the frame on Ms. C holding the door open for another teacher. Her hair is falling out of her bun and her scarf is lopsided, but she was always kind of disheveled like that. I can’t get a good enough view of her face to tell whether or not she looks worried.

My gaze moves to her briefcase. Something is different about it. I zoom in; it looks like she’s stuffed the case with manila folders and couldn’t close it properly.

I switch cameras and rewind just to be sure: Her briefcase didn’t have those folders before she went into the parking garage.

Either she took the folders from the office, or from a room in the underground tunnel when she used it to get from the parking garage to the humanities building.

I fast forward to the end of the day, trying to track her final movements on campus. She leaves the humanities building and heads for the garage, briefcase in tow.

Two minutes later she drives out of the garage in a black car. I pause it, trying to get a clear picture of the license plate, but it’s too fuzzy.

I rub the area below my eyes. What if May 15 wasn’t Ms. C’s last day on campus? After all, it was the next morning that the teacher in the office across from hers told me she was gone.